So you're basically cherry picking on what supports your argument and discarding the rest on the grounds that it doesn't fit your world view of Star Trek? Okay.

As I've pointed out before, in TOS, that's what we get. It's got less to do with the VFX and more to do with the time of dialogue.

"Roiling orange fireballs" might just be what a Romulan Plasma weapon looks like. Have you considered that?

"Lighting of ships in TOS" again, have you considered that in the Star Trek universe that's how bright it is?

"Ultra dense nebula" again, have you considered that in the Star Trek universe that phenomena exists? Anyway, not an FX issue.

"Ships shown a few lengths away when they are much farther away by dialogue" - that came with TNG and afterwards and I'm not pointing to TNG. The original TOS FX got that part right.

If you insist that TOS warp drive works in the way you think it works, can you support your argument with the evidence in the show?

Christopher wrote:

Come on, you can't seriously take differences in visual effects as concrete evidence, given how many different, unrelated creative teams are responsible for their creation and how little systematic thought is put into them. Not to mention how many complete impossibilities are included for the sake of aesthetics, like roiling orange fireballs in the vacuum of space, ships that have bright key and fill lights in the depths of interstellar space, nebulae that are millions of times denser than real nebulae, ships that are shown to be only a few ship lengths apart when dialogue explicitly puts them thousands of kilometers apart, etc. It's impossible to take visual effects literally as concrete evidence of anything. To say warp drive is slower near planets just because the folks at ILM who did the shot of the BoP warping away from Earth made it move slowly across the screen -- I'm sorry, that's just not reasonable. It's only evidence of an inconsistency in how different artists choose to interpret the story, not of an in-universe inconsistency.

sojourner wrote:

^Yeah, I tried to tell him that earlier. What can you do?

This is purely conjecture as there is nothing seen/heard onscreen stating the ship does not reach lightspeed. If we were to rely on interpreting the visual effects then we would have to admit that most of the time we never saw ships going faster than light speed in all of Star Trek.

How about specific evidence that supports your statement?

We see that the BOP takes about 2 minutes of dialogue to go from the atmosphere to just about leaving orbit in "The Voyage Home" at "warp speed".

What other episodes of TOS would you point to that qualifies for "If we were to rely on interpreting the visual effects then we would have to admit that most of the time we never saw ships going faster than light speed in all of Star Trek"?